


charm/blade

by BeatriceEagle



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: (of the kind that you will typically find discussed in atla fic), Character Study, Child Abuse, Childhood Sweethearts, Complicated Relationships, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 15:26:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29702619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeatriceEagle/pseuds/BeatriceEagle
Summary: Finally, with her choices rapidly dwindling, Mai surrendered to the inevitable, and began to think. She thought about the unending shame her parents must have felt at the news of her incarceration, and it brightened the walls of her dingy cell. She thought about Tom-Tom, just barely starting to babble, and how she would never get to see him grow into a little person. Mostly, though, she thought about the choices that had brought her to this prison cell. Her choices. Zuko’s. Azula’s.
Relationships: Mai/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 53





	charm/blade

**Author's Note:**

> Most of this fic has been sitting on my drive for over a year, and I decided enough was enough, time to get it out there.
> 
> The title is a paraphrased reference to "A Charm/A Blade" by Phosphorescent.
> 
> This fic contains discussions of child abuse and violent imperialism, but I would say that it's less graphic on those subjects than the show itself.

Mai thought she’d been bored a lot in her life, but she never knew boredom until she went to prison.

After their attack on Azula, Mai and Ty Lee were separated. Ty Lee went to a prison in the heart of the Fire Nation, where, Mai later learned, she made fast friends of the Kyoshi Warriors. Mai stayed at the Boiling Rock, where her uncle could keep her safe under his supervision. Safe and secluded.

There were no scrolls in prison. No friends to talk to. Definitely no knives. Day after day, Mai woke with the morning call, ate the prison gruel alone in a corner of the mess hall, did her chore assignments—always one of the choice assignments, thanks to her uncle’s interference, never anything demeaning or disgusting—and marched back to her cell, where she sat. For hours.

At first, she raged. She flung her bed clothes at the locked door, and trampled them under her feet. But her rage burned out quickly—pillows and blankets were poor kindling, and Mai had never had much fuel to begin with.

Then she tried meditating. But meditating was really just the same as sitting, when you got right down to it. She’d never seen the point of it outside of prison, and it turned out that being locked up didn’t bring spiritual enlightenment.

Finally, with her choices rapidly dwindling, Mai surrendered to the inevitable, and began to think. She thought about the unending shame her parents must have felt at the news of her incarceration, and it brightened the walls of her dingy cell. She thought about Tom-Tom, just barely starting to babble, and how she would never get to see him grow into a little person. Mostly, though, she thought about the choices that had brought her to this prison cell. Her choices. Zuko’s. Azula’s.

#

Like peasants shaped their days out of the rising and the setting of the sun, Mai could plot her life along Azula’s trajectory. There was the long, dull nothing that came before her; the heady rush of her early regard; the drawn-out cycles of mind games and sweetness. Even during the months they’d been separated when Mai was in Omashu, Azula had never been far from her mind. She was more than the princess: She was Mai’s best friend, the swinging pendulum weight at the center of her world.

Mai met Zuko for the first time just as her initial infatuation with Azula was starting to shade with wariness. Azula had invited her and Ty Lee to the palace for the first time, and as excited as Mai was, somewhere just beyond that, she was also scared. She painted a mirror-smooth front over it, but Azula could tell. Azula could always tell.

“I’m so glad you’re here! Come on, I’ll show you the gardens,” Azula said, her lips curling into a smirk.

Mai shook out her sleeves and followed calmly in Azula’s wake, wondering what Azula had in store for her in the gardens. Beside her, Ty Lee blithely admired the palace’s golden architecture.

The garden they eventually stopped in was delicate and peaceful, full of sweeping cherry blossoms and artfully arranged rocks, centered around a placid pond. It was extraordinarily boring, and it did not seem like a place that Azula would frequent in her spare time.

Azula made a beeline for the pond, and scooped up one of the rocks from alongside it, disregarding the careful arrangement.

“I assume you can both skip stones,” she said.

“Of course!” Ty Lee said, brightly. Mai just scoffed. She could hit a bullseye with a knife from thirty paces. Yes, she could skip stones.

Azula grinned and flung her stone into the water. It skimmed the water, but couldn’t really be said to be skipping. A split second later, it became clear why: Azula’s target hadn’t been the water, but a turtle duck sitting atop it.

“Oh no!” Ty Lee rushed to the water’s edge. “Poor thing. What an unlucky shot.”

Azula turned to Mai and stared at her, hard but somehow innocent at the same time. Ty Lee knew full well that Azula had been aiming for the turtle duck, but there had never been any chance that she would say so. This was a test. Mai’s test.

Mai sighed. “It’s just a rock. It’ll recover.”

Azula’s stare turned to a smile of benediction. She grabbed Mai’s hand. “This is boring anyway. Let’s go to the kitchens. I’ll make the chef make those cream puffs you like.”

Relieved and ashamed, Mai let Azula guide her out of the garden, painting another layer of mirror-gloss over herself with every step. But they hadn’t gotten past the gate before Ty Lee stopped them.

“Is that your brother?” she said, pointing.

A boy was watching them from behind the largest cherry tree, looking like the embodiment of all the wariness Mai was trying not to feel. He was clearly related to Azula—the family resemblance was startling—but if he had any of her confidence and poise, he wasn’t showing it right now.

Azula rolled her eyes. “It’s just Zuko.” She turned to leave the garden.

But the part of Mai that balked at the compromise that she’d just been asked to make, over at the turtle duck pond, moved her feet in the opposite direction. As both Azula and Zuko watched in surprise, she walked over to Zuko and bowed, making the sign of the flame with her hands.

“Prince Zuko,” she said.

After a moment of open-mouthed shock, Zuko bowed ungracefully back. “Um. Hi.”

“I’m Mai.”

“I know. I mean, Azula said you were… I mean, nice to meet you.”

Mai nodded, and, seeing that Azula’s stare had turned from surprised to calculating, hurried back to rejoin her friends.

#

It had never occurred to her to think about it before, but as Mai clutched her pillow to her stomach and let her back warm the cold cell wall, she considered the fact that it was a little surprising that Zuko had ever grown to like her, when his first encounter with her had been watching her take a test that, in retrospect, she had failed.

She should have told Azula not to throw rocks at turtle ducks. She should have said, out loud, that that’s what Azula had done. If she’d done that, Mai wouldn’t be in prison right now. At eight years old, Azula’s punishment for disobedience would have been swift and vicious; Mai would have been cut permanently from Azula’s life, made an outcast at school, perhaps even seen a downgrading in her parents’ social standing. But she would never have made it to the point where to disobey Azula was to commit treason.

More than that, though: Standing up to Azula would have been the right thing to do. Even over something as small as a turtle duck.

The last time Mai had let herself consider what the right thing to do was, she’d barely been old enough to understand the concept.

If throwing the stone at the turtle duck was wrong, and trying to kill Zuko was wrong, then surely Mai had witnessed a string of wrongs in between. The moment Mai thought of it, examples drifted into her mind like ashfall: Refusing to exchange the King of Omashu for Tom-Tom. The girl from school, who’d hailed from the colonies and had an Earth Kingdom noblewoman for a mother, who Azula had tormented. Whatever coercion she’d used to get Ty Lee to leave her circus dreams.

The whole time Mai had known Azula, she’d been failing one test after another. And the whole time she’d known Zuko, he’d been hiding behind cherry trees, watching her fail. Why _had_ he ever decided he’d liked her?

Maybe—Mai turned the idea over in her mind like candy on her tongue—Zuko had been failing tests of his own.

#

It was perhaps inevitable that Mai would come to like Zuko. There were very few boys in her life, and Zuko was older, and royal, and what Ty Lee called _cute_ , but what Mai herself, internally and grudgingly, admitted was… pleasing to look at.

She never said out loud that Zuko was attractive, or that she liked him. Azula was already well aware, and had seized on the knowledge with ruthless efficiency. Mai wasn’t going to give her any more leverage.

But she couldn’t stop herself from looking at him. Zuko would wander by, trailing his mother, or peer at them from behind a scroll in a corner, and Mai’s eyes would follow him helplessly. Sometimes—rarely—they spoke, and it was always just as awkward as it had been the first time. Every time that happened, Mai would go home telling herself that she was going to scrub this silly crush out of herself, that there was no reason to be so enthralled by a boy who could hardly string a sentence together.

There were other times, though, that she saw Zuko arguing with Azula, and even though he was still awkward, still hopelessly childish, he stood up to her. He said things to Azula that Mai would never have dared, got under her skin like no one else Mai knew, and braved Azula’s burning stare. And although Mai knew that he could do these things because he was royalty, Azula’s equal, and enjoyed a certain level of protection, it still impressed her. 

Any hope Mai had of killing her crush ended the day that she made a wrong turn on the way back from the privy and stumbled across Zuko practicing with his swords. The sword was not Mai’s weapon, let alone the dual dao, but she knew blades, she loved blades, and Zuko, with his shirt off and the firelight glinting off his sweat and the dao alike, _was_ a blade.

Mai held her breath as Zuko brought the swords swiftly down to either side, then pressed them together again, a single blade once more. He turned to put them away and startled when he saw her.

“Oh! Mai. I was just… practicing, obviously, I was practicing.”

Gloss, gloss, gloss. Let nothing show. “I didn’t know you practiced with swords.”

“Well, it’s not as good as firebending, but…” Zuko shrugged and looked down.

“Honestly, firebending is boring.”

Zuko’s head snapped up, astounded.

“All that talk about chi and breath,” Mai said, “and in the end you’re just taking a flamethrower to someone. Give me a good knife any day.”

For the first time that Mai could remember, Zuko laughed in front of her. It was a small laugh, childish, almost a giggle. She hadn’t been joking, but she didn’t mind that she’d made him happy.

“Would you like to try?” Zuko held out the swords, pommel first.

Mai took them. It had been years since she’d trained with a sword—she preferred the quick flexibility of a throwing knife, where you were never tied down, where there was always another weapon at the ready if your first failed you—but she remembered how to grip and how to swing.

“You have to treat them like an extension—”

“Of my arms, yes, I know,” Mai said.

She swept the swords to the left, to the right, and then down, as she’d seen Zuko do. The movement wasn’t as graceful on her, she knew, but a blade was a blade. She still savored it.

“You’re pretty good,” Zuko said.

Mai shrugged and handed the swords back to him. It was time to leave, before Azula caught her.

But before she left, she couldn’t help herself. She pulled one of her thin throwing knives from the brace inside her sleeve.

“Zuko.”

He turned to look at her, and quicker than any bent lightning, Mai flung the knife past him. It landed with a _thunk_ in the center of a fire emblem banner on the far wall.

Zuko looked from the knife to Mai and back, astonished, wary, delighted. Mai turned and left without another word, not bothering to go back for the blade. There was always another where that came from.

Not long after that day, Lady Ursa disappeared, and Ozai became Fire Lord. After that, whenever Mai saw Zuko, he always seemed to have a little bit of the blade in him, no matter what he was doing. It was wrong, maybe, but it made her like him that much more.

She never heard him laugh again, though, and she was sorry about that.

When Mai turned twelve, and still hadn’t succeeded in exterminating her crush, she started to consider _doing_ something about it instead. In theory, as a prince who stood several rungs higher than her on the social ladder, that should have been Zuko’s job, but Mai knew that Zuko would never make a move, even if he liked her. Which she thought he did. He had none of Azula’s skill with people; he could swing a blade and make a demand, but Mai wasn’t sure it would even occur to him to ask a girl out, and she knew that he would have no idea how to do so, if it did.

She imagined the conversation. “ _Prince Zuko,_ ” she would say. And then…

It turned out that Mai had no idea how to ask a boy out, either.

One day, Azula caught Mai staring at Zuko, as she tried to puzzle out her strategy. She leaned in and smiled conspiratorially.

“You should go for it,” she said. “Make your move.”

Mai raised an eyebrow, keeping the rest of her face still while she waited to see where Azula was going with this.

“After all,” Azula said, “my brother _is_ going to be Fire Lord one day.”

After that, Mai stopped trying to figure out how to ask Zuko out. She didn’t know how, and she didn’t know why, but there was danger, there.

It wasn’t until the Agni Kai that Mai understood the exact nature of that danger.

Mai and Ty Lee were fixtures at the palace, by then, and invited to major events like an Agni Kai as a matter of course. Usually Mai would have skipped a dreary firebending duel, but this one involved Zuko, so of course she was there, seated several rows back from Azula, Ty Lee beside her.

Like everyone else, she expected Zuko to duel the general. She was worried, but also excited, because this side of Zuko—the boy who agreed to duel men four times his age, the boy who spoke out in war meetings, the sharpened blade of a boy—was the side that had first drawn her to him.

And then the Fire Lord stepped out onto the dais, and Mai understood.

Zuko was not meant to become Fire Lord. He had never been meant to become Fire Lord. Every moment of the last three years, maybe even longer, had been leading to this fight, which Zuko was not meant to—could not possibly—win.

But Zuko didn’t even fight. He fell to his knees before the Fire Lord, begging for mercy, and Mai bit down on the urge to call out to him.

_Stand, Zuko. You have to stand and fight. Please, please, please, stand up for me._

The Fire Lord advanced, and Mai’s gut lurched. She’d thought that Zuko would be shamed for losing, or for not fighting. But the Fire Lord would not be denied: Fight or no fight, there would be fire.

She did not allow herself to avert her eyes. _Gloss, gloss, gloss_ , she thought. _You are a girl made of gloss_ , as Zuko’s screams rang through the room, and Ty Lee gripped her hand so tightly her bones ached.

The next day, Azula made a rare visit to Mai’s house.

“Princess Azula,” Mai’s father said, bowing deep. “You honor us.”

Azula brushed him aside and strode directly to Mai. She looked serious; not unhappy, but for once, not calculating.

“You should come see Zuko,” Azula said.

He was dying. This was an invitation to a deathbed visit. Mai’s brain flew out of her head, and it was only years of habit that kept her face still.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Unconscious. But they say he’ll recover.”

Mai exhaled. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath.

Azula paused, examining Mai. “He’s been banished. The ship is setting sail to take him out of the country tomorrow. If you ever want to see him again, this is probably your last chance.”

Banished. Not disinherited, not shamed, not burned, _banished_. Tomorrow, Zuko would be gone, just like his mother.

Mai looked into Azula’s eyes, trying to see if this was another test. If she went to see Zuko, would she be punished somehow? Would it be proof that she was weak, that she loved a weak, shameful prince?

She didn’t think so. She thought, through the haze of disbelief, that this was one of those rare moments where Azula was trying to be _kind_. She could go. She could see Zuko, one last time. Before…

Before he left her life forever. What was the point? What was the point of admitting to Azula and herself how she felt, right now, just as she lost any chance of it ever mattering? She had seen Zuko plenty of times. What difference would one more make?

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t need to see him.”

“Hm.” Azula shrugged one shoulder. “If he wakes up before he leaves, maybe I’ll tell him you didn’t say goodbye.”

#

Mai had not let herself regret refusing Azula at the time, but from her cell at the Boiling Rock, she could admit it. She regretted it. She’d always regretted it, from the moment she made the choice.

What was one more time? It was _one more time_. If Zuko had never come back—if the Avatar had stayed encased in his iceberg—the last image of him Mai would ever have had would have been kneeling on the floor, screaming, his face aflame. Maybe unconscious on a healer’s bed wasn’t much better, but at least it would have been something she’d chosen. A purposeful goodbye.

When Zuko was gliding away on a gondola hung from a quickly fraying wire, that was what Mai thought of. This could be the last time she ever saw him. And if she was being given another choice, then she would not let this time end in horror. She would not live with that regret.

Mai didn’t regret her choice to save Zuko. She was in prison now, and likely would be for the rest of her life, but Zuko was alive.

Of course, given what he was trying to do, he probably wouldn’t be alive for much longer. But Mai wouldn’t have to watch him die.

It felt very clean, living without that regret. Mai was imprisoned, and bored, and had been epically dumped by her jerk of a boyfriend, but when she thought about the years she’d spent wishing she’d said goodbye to Zuko, she smiled.

She’d rather be in prison without regrets, than free and weighed down by them.

#

Mai saw Zuko for the first time in three years in one of the Earth King’s private studies. She could have sped their reunion up by half an hour, but when Azula had come to tell her the news—the Avatar was dead, Zuko’s honor restored—Mai had still been dressed as a Kyoshi warrior. She wanted to be recognizable when she saw Zuko again, so she washed her face and changed her clothes, before going to see him.

Outside the study, she paused with her hand on the door. She had no idea who was waiting for her inside. Zuko had been in exile for years, a fugitive for months; did anything remain of the boy she remembered?

Mai didn’t even know what he looked like. A month or so into Zuko’s exile, Azula had told Mai, savoring every sentence, that her father had had a letter from her uncle, and Zuko had a scar now. She’d told Mai that it was hideously disfiguring.

“You’re lucky he can’t come back to the Fire Nation,” she’d said. “Imagine having to see that all the time.”

But other than Zuko’s very stylized wanted posters, which gave her an idea of the size and location—something she could have guessed for herself—Mai had no real way of knowing what the scar looked like.

Except now she did. All she had to do was open the door.

He was looking out the window, when she entered, the left side of his face turned away from her. From this angle, he looked exactly as he had when he’d left—and yet different. Three years older, his hair cut short, his posture tight.

Then he turned, and she saw the scar.

It was, in fact, quite large. What Azula had neglected to mention—likely, she hadn’t known—was that it was also quite red, and seemed to pull his entire face to the left. It crept over his brow, pulled his eyelid tight, ate into his hairline, swallowed his ear. With it, the tenor of his face was entirely different from what it had been. He wasn’t ugly, but before, when Mai had looked at him, the first thing she’d seen was his eyes, or sometimes, his lips. Now, she couldn’t imagine looking and seeing anything but the scar.

That scared her. Mai hadn’t been scared in a long time, hadn’t had to reach for a coat of gloss in years. But here she was, faced with Zuko, and her traitorous hands wanted to tremble.

“Hi Mai,” Zuko said. And smiled, just a little.

And he was Zuko again. Scarred, mysterious, changed, but _Zuko_.

Mai knew, with sudden clarity, that no matter what she’d tried to tell herself for the last three years, she’d never really put her feelings for Zuko away. She cared about him. She’d always cared about him, even when he was “just Zuko,” and Azula didn’t want her attention divided. Even when it was clear that caring about him was dangerous. Even when he was in exile. And if there was a chance, now, that they could have something, Mai wasn’t going to let it slip away.

“Hi Zuko,” she said. She stepped further into the room. “I hear you’ve had quite an adventure in Ba Sing Se.”

He looked away, this time with his scar toward her. “Yeah, it’s been… It’s been something.”

“And now you get to go home.”

He kept looking away. “Yeah.”

Mai wished he would talk to her, which wasn’t something that Mai was used to wishing. There was something _wrong_ with Zuko, and of course any idiot would expect that, but if he wouldn’t even have a conversation with her, maybe she didn’t have a chance at all. It had been three years. Maybe he no longer cared for her.

“Personally,” she said, “I can’t wait to get out of this city.”

Zuko laughed.

Mai looked up, startled. She hadn’t heard Zuko laugh in almost six years. It sounded nothing like it used to—it was more a huff than a giggle, now, a puff of air like he was too tired to do anything more—but it was a real laugh, and she’d caused it.

“You haven’t changed at all,” he said.

“You have.”

“Obviously.” Zuko’s hand went to his scar.

Mai rolled her eyes, which she hadn’t intended to do. “I didn’t mean that. I just meant you’re… older.”

“So are you.”

“You know what I mean. You just seem different.”

Zuko furrowed his brow. Mai watched in fascination as it warped his scar tissue. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I do.”

Mai took another step closer. “Can I ask you something?”

“Is it about my time in Ba Sing Se? Because honestly I was hoping—”

“When we were kids, did you like me?”

Zuko stopped short, blinking into the abruptness of Mai’s question. “Did I… I liked you. I liked that you could throw knives. I liked knives, really. That’s what I liked.”

Well, some things weren’t so different.

“Zuko. Did you _like_ me?”

“Why are you asking?” Zuko said, an edge of frustration in his voice.

“Because I liked you.”

“That was just something Azula said to embarrass us.”

“No, it was the truth. I liked you. And I still do.”

“You do?” Zuko didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, so Mai took them for him. He wrapped his fingers around hers.

“I do.”

She took one last step into his space. Mai had never seen his face this close up, scarred or unscarred.

 _Kiss me_ , she thought. _I can’t do all the work, here_.

And then he did.

When they broke apart, he said, “Do you still throw knives?”

Mai scoffed. “Of course.”

“Good.”

“Do you still use your swords?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

In the weeks that followed, Mai started to understand how Zuko had changed. He was angrier than the boy she remembered, liable to lash out with an edge of real, startling fury, according to no pattern she could piece together. On the other hand, he was also quieter than he had been; Mai would often find him staring out into the distance, just as she had in the Earth King’s study. She would ask him what he was thinking about, and he’d tell her, but his answers sometimes didn’t make any sense.

“I’m wondering who I am,” he told her once. “I took on a lot of different identities, out there, and I’m wondering how much of them were really lies.”

No version of Zuko that Mai had ever known before would have said something like that, and she didn’t know how to respond. So she let it sink into the gloss.

“Okay, weirdo,” she said, with half a smile. And Zuko took her hand and came to get lunch with her.

The anger was harder to deal with. Part of her liked it, because somewhere deep, deep inside, in a place she never touched, Mai was angry too, and she’d always liked it when Zuko said and did the things she couldn’t. But mostly, his anger irritated her. It wasn’t always directed at her, but often enough it was, and frankly, it didn’t matter who the target was. Trying to dance around Zuko’s outbursts reminded her of trying to predict Azula’s mood, and Mai hated that comparison. She suspected Zuko would have hated it just as much, but she was never quite cruel or brave enough to say it out loud.

But despite the changes and the confusion, he was still the blade of a boy she’d fallen for, even sharper now than he’d been when he left. Her eyes still followed him when he walked through the room.

And now that their relationship gave them permission to spend time together, Mai and Zuko had fun together, as much as either of them was capable of having fun. They insulted the generals’ mustaches. They went for long swims that turned into more than swims. Mai taught Zuko how to throw a knife.

Azula hated it. She tried at every opportunity to interrupt them, to force them apart, to turn them against each other. Once, when Zuko was out of the room, she brought up a new twist on the old line about the scar—“How can you stand to kiss him?”—and Mai just stared until she turned away to boss Ty Lee around instead.

Mai didn’t know whether Azula was jealous of Mai’s split attention, or whether this was all part of some elaborate throne game she was playing with Zuko, but for once, she didn’t care. She was going to be with Zuko, whether Azula liked it or not.

And then, came the Day of Black Sun. And then, Zuko left.

Azula found Mai in her room, crying over Zuko’s letter. It was the first time Mai had cried in over a decade, so of course Azula was there.

“Oh, Mai,” Azula said, sitting next to her and running her fingers through Mai’s hair. “I’m sorry. I should’ve tried harder to warn you. Zuko never could be trusted.”

Mai silently dried her face, and rolled the letter back up. She knew better than to open her heart to Azula, but Zuko had done something to her—chipped at her gloss, let the acid inside seep through the cracks—and Azula was _here_ , and still so much the center of her world.

“He didn’t even let me say goodbye,” she said.

#

They’d taken Zuko’s letter away from her when she was imprisoned, but Mai had it memorized.

_Dear Mai,_

_I’m sorry that you have to find out this way, but I’m leaving. I thought that I could return to the Fire Nation, restore my honor, and be the prince my father always wanted—but I understand now that there is no honor in the things that the Fire Nation is doing, or the prince my father wants me to be. Returning here was a mistake, and it’s one I have to set right. I have to find the Avatar, and help him restore balance to the world. I’m only sorry that I have to leave you to do it._

_Yours,  
Zuko_

In her initial anger, Mai hadn’t paid much attention to anything past, “I’m leaving.” It had been so out of nowhere, so sudden: One day, he’d been her boyfriend, and the next day, he’d been gone. Just like that awful day three years ago, only this time, _Zuko_ had been the one to do this to her.

But now, with all the time in the world to think, Mai chewed over every word of Zuko’s letter, and realized that some of them sounded familiar. “I don’t know what the right thing is,” he’d said on Ember Island; “I didn’t feel like me,” he’d said the night before he left. All this talk about the Avatar and balance had come out of nowhere, but clearly Zuko had been grappling with some moral dilemma for a long time.

Mai didn’t understand why Zuko had done what he did, but standing up to Azula and the Fire Lord, whatever the reasons—that was exactly the sort of thing she loved about Zuko. She only wished she could’ve been there to see him do it.

She didn’t understand why Zuko had done what he did, but the longer she sat in prison, the more she thought that she wanted to.

#

Later, when the war was over, and no one was in a cell, and there was peace between all parties, Mai asked him again. Not as a challenge, but as an honest question.

“Why did you leave?”

Zuko looked up from the scroll of troop movements he was studying, quirking an eyebrow. It was funny how the scar was just part of his face, now. “You mean, during the war?”

“Yeah.”

“You know why I left. To join Aang.”

“But why did you do that? I know that Azula and Ozai were out of control, but it seemed like there was more to it. I just… want to understand.”

Zuko frowned and looked away, his face going distant like it had so often during their time together after Ba Sing Se. “I saw things, when I was in exile. I tried to forget, but… the Fire Nation’s war was destroying the world. I had to try to fix it.”

“You’re not a pacifist, are you?” Mai said, with a touch of sarcasm.

Zuko laughed his half-laugh. “Not like Aang. But it was a bad war. It wasn’t helping anyone. Not even the Fire Nation, really. It was just making my father more powerful.”

“What did you see out there?”

For a moment, Zuko’s eyes went distant again. But Mai barely had time to wonder what he was seeing before he came out of it and smiled.

“Do you want me to show you?” he asked.

#

The house was small, worn-in, almost forgettable, if you were just passing by. But inside, Mai found, it was well-kept and full of things that were… well, not interesting, but certainly better than the landscape of dust and dirt outside. Handpainted teacups, tapestries stitched without the grandeur of the ones that hung in the Caldera, but some of them clearly just as old. Everything in the house was old, actually; not ancient like a relic, but _old_ , like the residents used everything they owned for as long as they possibly could.

The girl who had opened the door to them had fallen into the deepest bow Mai had ever seen. “Fire Lord,” she’d said.

Zuko, to Mai’s surprise, had removed the crown from his head, tucking it into his robes. “You can still call me Lee, if you like.”

The girl—Song, as Zuko had introduced her—had opted not to call him Lee, although she did, after much prompting, concede to calling him Zuko.

Now Mai and Zuko sat at Song’s table, while her mother brought them tea.

“This is delicious,” Zuko said, “but it’s not why I’m here.”

Song and her mother looked at Zuko warily.

“I owe you a debt,” he continued. “And this can’t possibly begin to repay it, but—I’ve brought you a new ostrich horse. And a month’s worth of feed.”

“Thank you,” said Song’s mother.

Zuko shook his head, and swallowed. “I found out what happened to your husband. If you… want to know. It’s not good.”

Song clung to her mother’s hand. “Please, tell us.”

“He was taken to a prison outside of Gaoling. He died there a year ago, of… well, the records don’t say what, but probably an illness. They had an outbreak at around that time.”

Song and her mother were both crying, but not desperately, the way Mai would have expected if they’d been delivered sudden tragic news. They’d already known he was dead, she realized.

“I’m sorry,” Zuko said, and then he bowed over his lap, so low that his forehead touched the floor.

And Mai, looking at him, thought: _This is a boy I could love._


End file.
